Under a memorandum of understanding announced on July 14, the U.S. Coast Guard Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Information Technology (C4IT) Service Center will leverage AFCEA resources for providing market research, identifying technology trends and raising awareness of ongoing initiatives.

AFCEA headquarters lost power right in the middle of the production cycle of this issue of SIGNAL Connections. Rumor has it that road construction taking place in the area caused the glitch. Without access to computers and VoIP phones, staff members emerged from their work spaces like bears after hibernation and actually talked to each other face to face. The incident brought to light an escalating issue that is often ignored: technology is a tool; it’s not communication.

A large cyberespionage campaign has been ongoing for five or more years, with its targets ranging from private companies to nations. Commercial cybersecurity experts say all the evidence so far points to a “state player” as the source of the attack, and they have located server logs outlining the extent of the attack.

According to a recent story in Bloomberg News, the Department of Homeland Security tried a little experiment by dropping CDs and thumb drives in the parking lots of government building and private contractors. Well, one would imagine this would be a great opportunity for our government employees and the specialized contractors that support them to show off their cyber security chops. After all, isn’t it a given that these people would have cyber security and information assurance best practices drilled into them?

A small business innovation research (SBIR) program is allowing U.S. Army researchers to generate on-the-move satellite links that would take advantage of the greater data rates available from military communications satellites. A recent demonstration at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, proved the worth of this approach for transmitting and receiving vital situational awareness data and command and control messages.

At the time of the July edition of Mazz-INT Blog, the government was tied in a knot over coming to grips with how to get long term spending under control so there would be the political conditions to raise the debt ceiling on August 2nd; NATO forces were engaged in a seeming stalemate in Libya to remove Gadhafi from power; there was rising concern about corruption in the Karzai "government" in Afghanistan; near open confrontation between Islamabad and the Washington over continuing US unilateral drone attacks against Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership inside of Pakistan; and the US Intelligence Community (IC) was finishing a quiet but well deserved victory lap for taking out Osama bin Laden. As August begins I am happy to report that Bin Laden remains dead ----- with increasingly negative impacts for Al Qaeda, but little else as changed.

The cyber security e-mail lists, Twitter streams, Facebook messages and chat circuits were abuzz today over a new report released from the Brookings Institution. This piece, titled "Pirates of the ISPs: Tactics for Turning Online Crooks into International Pariahs," was authored by Noah Shachtman. Noah is a Fellow at the Brookings Institution 21st Century Initiative. Many of us in the tech community also know him well from his many contributions as an editor of Wired magazine and his constant quality work on Wired's national security blog, Danger Room.

The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency is beginning a major scrub of user requirements as it proceeds with its new commercial satellite services acquisition process. The communications agency is taking a hard look at thousands of customer requirements to determine the validity of some against the necessity of others.

U.S. Army communicators are focusing on providing key enabling technologies to warfighters who already are exploiting new networking capabilities. The urgencies of warfare, coupled with emerging communications requirements, have mandated that engineers concentrate on the user end of connectivity.